The Anachronism Affair
by Aster Corbett
Summary: When a time-traveling conundrum strikes New London in the form of a displaced young woman and the circular logic that surrounds her, New Scotland Yard calls upon Sherlock Holmes to unmask a mysterious temporal menace... and the mystery of the girl herself


All right! This is my first fanfiction for SH22. I'm NOT new at fanfiction itself, however, so don't expect me to _completely_ suck.

YES, this fiction involves a female original character and time travel. But I can promise you that this is not a canoncharacter x MarySue story. This story is a challenge to me, to make a believable central female character and use her in a plot-twist that has been used in many different fandoms. But the challenge is to make it engaging and do it right. In other words, this is an experimental story-- making two of the no-noes of Sue fiction into yes-yeses.

This first chapter is mostly an introduction to that female character and the splash header for the plot. If it was a TV episode, it would be the 2 minutes right before the main plot, introducing the story concept.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, so please don't sue me. But I do own my plot and original characters.

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_**September 12, 2104**_

"Whatcha got there, Wiggins?"

It wasn't uncommon for several street children to drop in for afternoon tea at 221B Baker Street. Few people frequented the neighborhood itself, so nobody really noticed that the children most definitely did not live there. In fact, nobody really noticed the children at all.

That was their purpose, after all. They were the Baker Street Irregulars, and their purpose was to gather information and assist Mr. Sherlock Holmes whenever he saw fit. They knew everything about New London there was to know, and were able to travel unhindered and unnoticed wherever they were needed.

But they did go to school. Mr. Sherlock Holmes was quite adamant about that detail. In return, they were able to come as they pleased. The trio – Wiggins, Deidre, and Tennyson – often did their homework at Baker Street.

And what better place was there?  
"Just some history material I've got to study. You know, boring stuff?"

Tennyson nodded and beeped a little through his synthesizer; he preferred math to history any day.

"I bet it's not so bad," Deidre teased, "Jus' gotta read it an' take notes? A right cushy number, if you ask me."

"No way. It's all useless and obscure. Listen to this:

" ' The Global Temporal Stability act was first passed in 2018 when the first conventional time machine was developed and then decommissioned by the United Nations Special Forces when it proved a threat to legal and moral affairs on a global scale.' "

"Ugh! Nevamind, Wiggins. You win—it's dry as dirt."

"I beg to differ."

Wiggins jumped a bit as he suddenly noticed the tall form of Holmes leaning over him, looking deeply interested in the material.

"It's not what the text says that matters here, he said. " but rather, what it doesn't say. Clearly some catastrophic event occurred and the passage is now attempting to dismiss it."

Deidre closed her mouth and nodded in realization. "So you're sayin' that maybe some bloke tried to use sumthing like that f'sumthing awful?"

"Precisely."

Tennyson emitted a set of quick, amazed bleeps at the idea.

"Yeah, I wish I knew what happened too," Wiggins said in amazement. "Nobody's been allowed to build a time machine ever since then. Think it was labeled universally hazardous tech or something. Something bad had to have gone down to do that!"

Holmes nodded in approval, but said little to the comment but a few words.

"Seek, and you shall find."

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_**Sherlock Holmes in the 22**__**nd**__** Century:**_

_**The Anachronism Affair**_

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**_September 12, 2011_**

_NAME : CHASE, PENNY_

_GRAD. YEAR: '15_

_COURSE LIST:_

_AP PSYCHOLOGY  
HON JOURNALISM  
HON BRIT. LIT  
CURRENT EVENTS  
PHOTOGROPHY  
CALCULUS  
HON. BIO_

_PHYS. CREDITS:_

_GYMNASTICS TEAM  
CERTIFIED LIFEGUARD  
_

_DORMITORY: 156W SINGLE_

_STUDENT ID: 223406419_

WHACK WHACK

"Ssh!"

A heavy thumping echoed through the thin walls of the 'W' dormitory complex of New Hampshire College at around 7-o-clock PM on September 1st, 2011. It wasn't too extraordinary, but the students in surrounding rooms loudly banged the ceiling and floor in protest.

"Stupid me!"

WHACK WHACK

"SSH!"

"STUPID ME!"

All at once, the door to the offending dormitory was forced open and several angry-looking half-dressed girls glared into the tiny room, looks of rage on their features. "Stop making that noise!"

In the flickering undead light of the fluorescent lamp, a single young woman pulled away from the wall she was beating her head in on and glared that the crowd she was attracting. Her blond hair was undone messily, and she seemed to be half in her pajamas, half still in her street clothes. In one hand, she crumpled the school-issued temporary ID papers in annoyance.

"Could you guys just go away, please?" she croaked, recovering from the pain she had inflicted. "I'm in the middle of feeling stupid."

They obliged, wondering what in hell was going on. Finding no more solace in the fiberboard wall, Penny Chase flopped onto her twin bed that took up almost a fifth of her minuscule room. Normally, she never would have been banging her head on a wall in the first place—she was very sane—but the chain of events for the day was running around like a buffalo in her brain and she felt guilty for every single link in it.

"Good job, Chase. Good freaking job," she mumbled, her headache no better than it had been several aspirins ago. "Let's go to college and not actually tell anybody where you are. Let's _accept_ the option to take a double major on the fly instead of keeping your schedule tame and actually sane. What the hell were you thinking? Psychology major AND Journalism major AND literature minor? Stupid me!"

Her friends had been working on that send-off party for _weeks_, she knew, and she had just blown it. Or her parents had, anyway. It hadn't been in her original plans to be dragged out of bed at four AM and shipped off before dawn had even broken over the day of truth. But Penny felt she had blown it somehow, anyway. And just to say 'yes' without thinking when the scheduler had asked her about the most important decision in her college experience?

You're not on some kind of substance, Penny, she told herself. There's no excuse for that kind of stuff! What's wrong with you?

In truth, similar happened every day to her. She would randomly forget her bags, or fail notice that it was raining and that she should open an umbrella, or agree to things without remembering that she did so. No matter how hard she tried, it always came down to her being a complete oblivious airhead. Sometimes she had the distinct feeling that she was floating around in a hot air balloon somewhere: stuck in the clouds with no way down.

"It's just stupid me again."

Rolling over on the bed again, she reached to her bag on the floor and pulled out her digital camera. It was her pride and joy; photography was one of her favorite pastimes. Affectionately, she called the gadget 'Snowy' for it's smudged white ceramic-titanium composite exterior.

One may think it strange to possess a camera customized to withstand six tons of shock. But it made sense to Penny: if she had any talent besides losing her belongings, it was breaking them. If not for the expensive commission her father had asked for (a Christmas present, really), Penny probably would have broken it on the day she received it.

Slowly, she flipped through an infinity of photographs she had stored in the device's twelve gigabites. Pretty vistas. A menacing alley. Snow-bent trees looking forlorn. A childrens' play structure upside-down, backwards, and sideways. Several people appeared again and again in the pictures. One of which was her boyfriend, who was grinning almost every frame he appeared in.

Oh gods, I miss him, she thought. The idea that he didn't know where she was (and wouldn't, until the building's phone reception was finally fixed) was a fairly raw barb. He would be furious with her when he found out that the party he had told her so vividly about wasn't ever going to happen.

Absently, she pointed the camera outside her window and began to snap a few melancholy shots of the bland, twilit courtyard outside of her window. Lamp-post standing all alone. A row of trees too perfect, too manufactured, to have personality. A park bench with two lovers kissing passionately.

Two lovers. Lovers….

Lovers…

Penny squinted and looked at the picture in her camera in confusion. There was something wrong with it, she felt. What was that down there? She increased the zoom by a factor of two and looked down again. Still too small, she frowned, and increased the magnification once again.

Her jaw dropped about a foot.

The man in the photograph was wearing the black leather jacket _she _had bought her boyfriend for his birthday. It was unmistakable because on the back of it was a huge dragon decal she had drawn on in metallic marker herself. But the angle was bad and a part of her mind tried to assure her that it was nothing more than a coincidence and the jacket just had a reasonably similar design on it.

Shaking in fear, Penny almost flew up the stairs to the roof of the 'W' building. The cool evening air hit her like a wall, but in her trembling she hardly noticed it. Her eyes only flew to the couple still embracing far below. Crawling to the edge of the building, she focused her camera and began to zoom. Times two. Times three. Times four. Times five.

She was almost afraid to click the shutter when she saw, without a doubt, that her longtime sweetheart was indeed seeing another woman. But the fear left without a trace when the anger boiled up in her stomach. She did take the picture. And many, many more.

Her fingers flew even faster when she whipped her cell phone out, just as soon as the offending girl had said her goodbyes at the illicit rendezvous. He did pick up on the other end, but he didn't say much.

It was a sort of unholy joy that Penny found in her next words.

"Jayden Benjamin Trent, I have a bunch of interesting photos to send you."

--

Airhead! Airhead! Airhead!

It was probably her imagination playing tricks on her, but the sound of her motorcycle running sounded suspiciously like somebody jeering her. Then again, she wasn't in any position to think at all so she just let it all go as stupid little petty girl shock. After hanging up that phone, after screaming at that _horrible, beastly boy_ for destroying what little was left of the light in her life.

No friends. No boyfriend. No hope. No nothing.

_Stupid me._

After the fact, it seemed so blatantly obvious that something had been amiss with Jayden. It was that same feeling when the villain reveals his master plan in every pulp fiction novel ever written. It smacked her in the face, as if to scream to the world, 'I'm here and you never even saw me coming!'

It even seemed like a bad joke. Penny was sure that some sicko, somewhere, was laughing at her. The laughter just poured from the sky, from the smog-stained ink that was lit only by a slivered moon and her motorbike's headlights.

She had to get away from that place, she concluded. Even if it meant leaving late, she didn't care. It was a fight-or-flight instinct. She clung to her phone as a means of condemning that man. But she did not dare stay and meet him. Instead, she ran as far and as fast as she could away from the scene.

Airhead! Airhead! Airhead!

Stop that, she scolded. I'm not an airhead! I just… I just… I'm just a bit out of touch. I'm just a cell phone without reception. A car without its breaks. A bookish nerd stranded in the middle of civilization.

You're just useless, she told herself. You're not stupid. You're not incompetent. You're only terminally ineffective.

Not much better.

CRASH

A huge jolt brought her back to earth, earning a piercing scream of surprise. On the dark, deserted country highway, she had not even noticed a pickup truck pull up close beside her as she passed exit 34B. The impact of it hitting the rear end of her motorcycle was startling enough that Penny saw stars, unconsciously pouring on the gas and swerving away in shock. In horror, the vehicle did not slow or pull off—it sped up by her side, inching her closer, closer, closer to the edge of the road.

Penny's scream was muffled by her helmet as the black pickup truck rammed her squarely off the freeway, causing her to tumble down the ditch bank and into the woods on either side. The bike flew out from under her, and she rolled down into the bushes, streaking though leaves and bushes all the way. If it hadn't been for her helmet, she would have lost consciousness. Her jeans and zipper hoodie were heavily plant-stained, but otherwise unharmed… though as she came-to Penny was sure she had bruises in places she had previously thought impossible. Through the muddled haze, she pulled off her now-dented helmet and felt her camera case, checking for damage. As expected, the camera was unscratched: ceramic-titanium composite and impact glass were designed for much more brutal beatings. If it seemed silly to check her camera before she checked herself, Penny didn't notice.

She did notice the sound of a car door slamming at the top of the bank. It took a moment to absorb what it meant, to realize what was happening. It hadn't just been a hit-and-run; somebody was trying to _take_ her. The fuzzy realization sent a shiver of terror down her spine. And her legs, fueled by pure adrenaline began to run. She was in a little corner by herself as her legs ran, uncaring of the branches and bushes she was trampling, earning little cuts on her collarbone from a sharp stick scratching her as she flew past. She was shivering all alone, a little child once again for all her eighteen years.

It didn't save her when she sailed headfirst over an overturned stone, tumbling onto the mossy ground. Heavy footfalls crunched through the underbrush as she attempted to right herself, striking the cracked, dry earth behind her.

"This is as far as you go."

Penny almost screamed again when she registered the cold metal against her neck as a handgun. Quicker than a flash, the man had her hands behind her back and was marching her farther into the woods. Her throat was as dry as sandpaper and her limbs seemed to stagger as she was forced along. There was too much shock to cry.

"Why… why me?"

Her words sounded alien and hoarse. The quiver in the pit of her stomach was unlike anything she had ever experienced before. The fear… the fear of death, the fear of what this man would do… she had never experienced true fear before. Cowards suddenly seemed forgivable.

The man only laughed bitterly, a rough and ugly sound to her. He threw her down, scrambling to the leaves. Only this time, she was much too afraid to run or scream. As she turned to face him she could only see him in a very bare sense, but his middle-aged features were burned into her eyes while everything else she saw was a black-and-red blur.

"Why you, Penny?" the man asked, almost sentimental in his words as he pointed his strange-looking handgun at her. "You never ask too many stupid questions, so this must be an off day for you. It's just not characteristic of you."

"I… I don't know what you're talking about."

The man smiled in a sickly loving way. "You never will," he assured her, and aimed. "I'm ending it before it begins."

He fired in a pulse of red light, and Penny was gone from her world.

She didn't even have time to scream.

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A/N: Penny Chase is almost completely unnoteworthy. She's a bit of a bibliophile, but she doesn't make a big deal out of it. She's not a fangirl. In fact, she's not even a Sherlockian. She takes pictures everywhere she goes with her beloved camera. She's good at gymnastics simply because she didn't grow out of the sport (she's extremely small and finely built, something that's an advantage to gymnasts) and she only knows how to swim because she was forced to pass lifeguarding. Her thought is always drifting around absent-mindedly but it's not known if she's simply a hazy person or if there's some developed glitch in her personality... and even she doesn't know how she thinks when not 'being stupid.'

In other words, pretty much as average as a person can get, but not boring. Penny has a few strengths and a few flaws, but none of them really stand out too much against her character. She has no super-powers, but no crippling vices, either.

And trust the plot to be confusing. I've been told I'm an evil storyline contortionist and should be shot.


End file.
